how to get the cookies from a php curl into a variable

user_20895 0
Viewed 207671

So some guy at some other company thought it would be awesome if instead of using soap or xml-rpc or rest or any other reasonable communication protocol he just embedded all of his response as cookies in the header.

I need to pull these cookies out as hopefully an array from this curl response. If I have to waste a bunch of my life writing a parser for this I will be very unhappy.

Does anyone know how this can simply be done, preferably without writing anything to a file?

I will be very grateful if anyone can help me out with this.

curl cookies php
8 Answers
$ch = curl_init('http://www.google.com/');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
// get headers too with this line
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
// get cookie
// multi-cookie variant contributed by @Combuster in comments
preg_match_all('/^Set-Cookie:\s*([^;]*)/mi', $result, $matches);
$cookies = array();
foreach($matches[1] as $item) {
    parse_str($item, $cookie);
    $cookies = array_merge($cookies, $cookie);
}
var_dump($cookies);
user_339180

If you use CURLOPT_COOKIE_FILE and CURLOPT_COOKIE_JAR curl will read/write the cookies from/to a file. You can, after curl is done with it, read and/or modify it however you want.

SoapBox_363840

libcurl also provides CURLOPT_COOKIELIST which extracts all known cookies. All you need is to make sure the PHP/CURL binding can use it.

user_937470

My understanding is that cookies from curl must be written out to a file (curl -c cookie_file). If you're running curl through PHP's exec or system functions (or anything in that family), you should be able to save the cookies to a file, then open the file and read them in.

user_29933810
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